Using Microsoft’s Web-Based Office on Mac and Linux

No word wrap for pictures, clip art of tables

Microsoft’s free web version of Office has finally been opened up to computing platforms other than windows. I’ve tried it on both Mac & Linux and it worked reasonably well though on linux there’s a frequent pester box to ‘improve’ the rendering of text by installing Microsoft Silverlight which of course you can’t do in Linux. I have no idea if Moonlight , the mono Silverlight project on linux ,would work but the performance didn’t seem bad enough to proceed down that particular potential road of disappointment.

I tried the web application on Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and despite ‘the word on the street’ saying that the web office is optimised for Firefox and IE8 only I found no problems using Google Chrome. In fact I’d say it was less sluggish on Chrome than Firefox for me.

Curiously the ability to export your online document is hidden away in the the reading view which reveals you can export in any format as long as it’s Microsoft’s proprietary .docx format.

The most glaring omission for me is the complete inability to align or justify text around an embedded picture, clip art or table in Word. For me this is a serious flaw when comparing Microsoft’s web office offering against the more established alternatives such as Google Docs, Zoho Office,ThinkFree Office or Adobe’s Buzzword.

Maybe more features become enabled if you actually own a copy of the standalone Office application but presume that the Mac & Linux versions will remain forever crippled in some very key feature departments which slightly negates the whole idea of platform neutral web based applications available in the cloud.

Microsoft’s Office for web is free to users signed up to a live.com account and is available to Facebook users too albeit still in beta form via Docs.com.

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Google Docs Adds Vector Drawing Ability

Google Docs now has a modicom of vector drawing tools at its disposal.Google has had to wait for browser feature sets to catch up by supporting Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) within the browser though Internet Explorer (including the latest IE8) does still not support this.Where a browser has no SVG support Google will revert to using Vector Markup Language (VML) instead.

Looks Familiar

A familiar look?

One of the great bug bears of anybody who demonstrates a modicum of technical ability with computers is the expectation of friends and family that you are automatically on hand to sort out any technical problems that they may encounter.

Sometimes this may go above and beyond what it is reasonable to expect and what may be practical to supply in any ongoing form particularly if the user seems adept at undoing your handiwork or resents attempts to educate them with regards to best usage to ensure a reliable and consistent desktop experience.

When your patience is tested you’ll often find the geeks of this world try to quell mounting support requests by installing linux as an alternative to their failing windows desktop.

Scaling Users

This is not as easy as it sounds as users generally hate change. I saw Steve Rubel quoted recently as saying that technology and software easily scales but people do not. This is true of people who get used to a single desktop experience (inevitably Microsoft Windows). Just replacing Windows with Linux will not automatically make an instantly happy computer user or quell support requests unless a degree of familiarity with their previous Windows experience is not maintained.By familiarity I mean look and feel rather than any virus, spyware or reliability experiences.

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

And throwing the baby out with the dirty bathwater is, in my experience an absolute last resort after you’ve re installed windows umpteen times to clear infections or to regain a snappier desktop experience.

Moving such users in slow stages can ease the ‘shock of the new’.

This can involved standardising their windows experience with the same applications that they will likely encounter should a linux alternative be worth a try.These days that’s a lot easier as applications like firefox, open office,Thunderbird, picasa and google earth are easily available on linux.

Replacing Microsoft Office with Open Office or one of the various web offices can also be a challenge but if users cannot adapt and have a legal offering of office then it can continue to be used on linux with a little setup of wine or laying down a small fee (well worth the easing off of support calls in my humble opinion) to install crossover office.

I find that applying a theme with the familiar colours and icons (users can balk if they don’t se folders in a familiar colour) works best on a distribution that has a combined bottom panel that operates similar to windows. In my case I prefer either Linux Mint (Gnome edition) or OpenSuSe. You can stack the usual top and lower screen panels on top of each other but at the bottom of the screen with other distributions but users are likely to easily mess up this arrangement.

Fonts

A quick word about google earth and picasa. These are essentially windows applications that operate under wine which can mean that the font rendering can need some severe tweaking especially when viewed via some modern graphic chips (Nvidia springs to mind). It puzzles me that picasa is installed with an additional menu to specifically adjust the menu fonts whereas google earth is not and launching the latter application can be a shock when the fonts are so small as to be unreadable. This means delving into the Google earth .conf files in order to adjust the menu fonts accordingly.

As a means of reducing friends and family support requests this approach can pay dividends but obviously depends on what software the user is wedded to.A slow wean off proprietary software may prepare the ground for a later linux desktop deployment.

Business is business

In the business world it’s easier to keep legacy windows applications on a linux desktop via virtualization of a thin client server arrangement which can pay dividends for office desktop uptime in the right environment.

A familiar look?

Resources: icon theme , wallpaper , eXperience theme

Person Steve Rubel

Right click for SmartMenu shortcuts

Open Office 3.0 Dev

I downloaded the latest developer version of Open Office, the open source office suite the other day more out of curiosity and a chance to contribute to testing. It certainly shows the direction that Open Office 3 may take.I admit to being more a user of  Zoho, Google Docs and Adobe’s Acrobat.com to meet most of my own writing needs.

This developer version finally runs native on Mac OS X & doesn’t use X11 as previous versions have and font rendering is therefore much improved. Start up was faster than I’d experienced in the past & defaults to the chooser screen as shown above.I’ll be putting it to use over the coming weeks.

Open Office is free and available for Windows, Mac & Linux

Developer versions here

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Office Stance

Ergonomics at work in this Stance chair which can operate in the more conventional mode.I have to hope that this is more comfortable than it looks as it looks akin to those ‘not standing up, not really sitting. down seat/ ledges that are available in some public areas. It also looks like leaning over to fetch a pile of paperwork which would invariably be placed on the farthest edge of the desk will see you pivoting against the knee rest in an amusing ‘feet nailed to the floor’ style but maybe it’s more practical in use than my own imaginings.

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George In The Office

Following Asda’s £15 suit for men comes general office attire for women with a top and trousers offering costing £5 for the pair. This follows on from the £10 school uniform and the £60 wedding dress all sold under the George in store clothing brand.

Of course it would be churlish to question the source and conditions under which such clothes are made quite so affordable.

 

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Becta Reports Microsoft

Things must be bad when Becta, the UK department of education IT advisory agency, of all people decides to report Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading. When I worked in education and IT support it was hard to get anybody to think outside the box in terms of the true cost of licensing and much use was made of advantageous licensing terms for Microsoft software and the leeway of contiguous vs. primary licensing which meant that if a library had 10 computers the school could estimate that no more than 6 at any one time would be using Office at exactly the same time and so money could be saved on licensing costs (see my own experience below).

Licensing Schmicensing
Lately different licensing terms have been made introduced to reduce the cost to education by making ongoing smaller yearly subscription payments rather than higher one off payments.Keep in mind too that in server based networks licenses are required for each computer that connects to the server in addition to licenses for the operating system (Windows 2000,XP or Vista) and the software on it (Microsoft Office, Adobe photoshop etc). It can all become a lot of money even at discounted prices.

Flexible Real World Use
The flexibility of fixed one off licensing based on actual real world use is lost on the subscription model where Microsoft requires payment for every machine in the school whether the software is used on it or not.For example on a 300-500 machine network that can still amount to a lot of cash each year when weighed against , say 270 licenses for Office based on actual real use at any one moment of time in the school day (it would be amazing if a 500 machine network had every single student using office at exactly the same time).

Anti Competitive
Becta’s complaint accuses Microsoft of anti competitive practice and changing the rules of licensing in an unfair and anti competitive way. Often Microsoft will donate software to education probably in the knowledge that once an establishment starts getting used to using that software and no other that it will be safe to introduce higher or changed licensing terms later because the user is locked in to what they know and so it’s a case of pay up or the hassle of introducing an alternative at short notice (always unpopular with teachers).

My Own Experience
I used to work in a secondary school where the head of IT and headteacher viewed licensing payments as dead money and would avoid paying for licenses by scribbling out my contribution to budget allowances and allocating a token payment which would usually be rounded down to widely incredulously low figures for simultaneous Office use across at 350 machine network. I used to caution against this in the assumption that at some point in the future licensing terms may change (mind you they were an odd lot. I came in as a volunteer originally and helped develop their network and introduce email ,only for the head to ban the use of email as it was “too democratic”).

 

 

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